Twister

How Tony Gilroy surprises jaded moviegoers.

Gilroy’s films evoke the Hollywood of the seventies, when thrillers featured complex characters.Credit Photograph by Martin Schoeller

It is a warm afternoon in the historic center of Rome, near Piazza Margana, and the film crew of “Duplicity,” a romantic spy caper, is doing repeated takes of a fifteen-second shot. The movie’s director, Tony Gilroy, who also wrote the screenplay, is at one end of an alley. The British actor Clive Owen stands near him, as does Julia Roberts. Nearby hover her makeup man and bodyguard, various assistant directors, gaffers, and carpenters, and members of the Italian crew. A black tarpaulin blocks the view of onlookers and the paparazzi. An assistant director calls for “last looks”—the final touchup by the makeup artists—and Roberts takes her mark, halfway up the street; Owen moves to the top of the alley. Gilroy calls “Action!” and is echoed by a “Movimento!” from the Italian assistant director who handles the extras.

Roberts begins walking down the street, and the cameraman, using a handheld steadicam, precedes her in a backward crab-walk. On cue, three children race up the alley past her, kicking a soccer ball. Roberts looks over her shoulder and continues until she is off camera. Moments later, Owen begins to walk fast; he breaks into a trot, runs past the children, decelerates, runs again. He is pursuing her. He runs until he runs out of street.

“Cut!” Gilroy cries. “That look is so strong,” he says to Roberts. “That was great. That revealed a lot. Great.” Roberts, who has already done several versions of this scene, is clearly exhausted. “My mojo’s gone,” she says. She also has the flu and an ear infection. The cast began filming at 4 A.M., outside the Pantheon. Gilroy assures her, “Even at quarter speed, you’re still a thoroughbred.” Roberts sits in her folding chair and removes her espadrilles; someone’s hands take them from her. She sees the kids still playing with their soccer ball and adopts a mock-Chekhovian tone: “Oh, to be young and play in the heat and do it over and over and not complain about water or time or last looks.” She turns to Gilroy: “O.K., I’ve come up with something that’s really going to rock your world.”

“I need an after-lunch pick-me-up,” he says.

“Coming up.”

“Let it rip!”

They shoot the scene once more. The children chase the soccer ball again; Roberts looks over her shoulder again, this time more subtly. The viewer is supposed to wonder, What, exactly, is she looking for?

“Cut! Print that!” Gilroy is pleased. The actors and crew mill. Everyone avoids eye contact with Gilroy; one can read the hope on their faces. “Let’s do it one more time,” he says. “This time, no steadicam.” As the players take their marks again, he says to himself, “It’s good to be greedy.” He pauses. He wants this extra take. “Maybe, if you make a thousand films, you know what you need right away, but I can’t imagine not wanting to have that.”

“Yeah, that’s all wrong,” Gilroy is saying. “Her look falls in the wrong place.” He stares in silence; Owen and Roberts are now out of frame, but the children are still kicking the soccer ball. Gilroy is watching a screen in an editing suite at the Brill Building, in New York. It is more than four months later, early October. He is watching the footage that he filmed in Rome on an Avid monitor, a series of flat-panel displays with a disconcerting number of buttons. Half-eaten takeout food is on the table, and traffic from Times Square murmurs outside. The shades are drawn.

John Gilroy, Tony’s brother, is editing the film. Gilroy asks him to cue up more footage from Rome. Each take presents a small variation. In one, Roberts doesn’t look back at all. In another, the children steal the scene with their ebullience. The look that Roberts casts over her shoulder actually has an important structural role in the movie. Roberts plays Claire Stenwick; Owen is Ray Koval; both are career intelligence officers. Several years earlier, at a party in Dubai, Claire, then with the C.I.A., met Ray, then with MI-6; she seduced him, drugged him, then stole some military codes from his briefcase. For Ray, a ladies’ man—the script describes him as “Ray with the good suit and the easy smile”—there were multiple humiliations in this fleecing. He has spent the intervening years nursing not only his anger but also his passion for her. Rome marks their first meeting since that entanglement, and Gilroy wants the audience to be unsure if Claire knows that she’s being pursued. Perhaps she has laid another trap for Ray. Roberts’s glance must instill the viewer with a tantalizing sense of uncertainty just this side of frustration.

John runs more film, and Roberts keeps gliding by, her face expressive despite dark glasses. In one shot, she twists her neck. “That look is way too strong,” Gilroy says. In some takes, Roberts appears coyly amused; in others, she seems indifferent, a woman in a rush. Finally, in Take 5, Roberts gives a glance backward that is delectably ambiguous, turning back with a half smile. Is she looking at the children? Listening for Owen? Is she just enjoying Rome? A pigeon flies up behind her. The children play with fervor but don’t distract. Owen deftly navigates the street, his unbuttoned Armani jacket flapping in the breeze. He looks great.

Gilroy, leaning back in his lounge chair, smiles at his brother. “See, it just works,” he says. “She turns her head at the right moment. Where it falls—here.”

Tony Gilroy is best known as a writer of movie thrillers. The screenwriter William Goldman says of him, “Right now, he is as good as the game.” “Duplicity” will be the eleventh of his movies to be produced in little more than a decade. Among them are “Dolores Claiborne” (1995), “The Devil’s Advocate” (1997), and the three movies in the Jason Bourne series (2002, 2004, and 2007). One of Gilroy’s specialties is the potent, reflective, and often beleaguered action hero, a man with, as he says, “an incredible toolbox of skills that he has let rust.” In 2007, “Michael Clayton,” which he wrote and directed, received seven Academy Award nominations, including one for his screenplay and another for his direction. Clayton, played by George Clooney, is a fixer at a law firm; he helps the company’s clients when they bump up against police inquiries or uncoöperative judges. He gets friendly cops tickets to the game. He is oddly dignified in his cynicism. “I’m not the guy that you kill!” he shouts at his prime adversary, a corporate lawyer played by Tilda Swinton. “I’m the guy that you buy! Are you so fucking blind you don’t even see what I am?” Gilroy’s movie was taut and intelligent, and evoked the Hollywood of the nineteen-seventies, when thrillers were anchored by complex characters.

Today, the film industry considers adult-oriented drama a small target, and one that is getting smaller. Middle-aged Americans don’t go to the movies; young adults and teen-agers do, and they prefer action to talk, in part because they believe they know every possible movie character already. A screenwriter interested in human behavior can find himself ignored by big-studio executives looking for movies propelled by spectacle and superheroes. “The trend is making movies that don’t need screenwriters,” a top Hollywood screenwriter explained to me by e-mail. Gilroy is a canny player, though. He says that he’s “not into building blueprints of buildings that will never get built.” His movies follow two fundamental rules: “Bring it in within two hours” and “Don’t bore the audience.” Sitting in his office at the Brill Building one day, while his brother edited “Duplicity” in the next room, Gilroy picked up a copy of his script and riffled it. “It’s all white space,” he said to me. “It’s all about not writing.”

Gilroy loves puzzles, and “Clayton” was full of them. So is “Duplicity,” with its scheming, warily passionate spies. “If I told you I loved you, would it make any difference?” Claire asks Ray at one point. “If you told me or if I believed you?” Ray responds. Gilroy calls the film “counterprogramming—not the normal thing to do next.” It is fast, lighthearted, and intense. “ ‘Michael Clayton’ could have been a novel,” Gilroy says. “ ‘Duplicity’ could only exist as a movie.” Yet it, too, is out of step with current Hollywood practice. It is a thriller shot almost entirely indoors. Ray and Claire do not career through Rome in a Porsche. There are no police cruisers piling up behind them at the end. Their passion is communicated largely with faces, not bodies.

The engine of “Duplicity” is the question of who is tricking whom—and, thus, where reality lies. The movie has an array of flashbacks that scramble the time frame, a complication that almost prevented the film from being made. Steven Spielberg, who, at one point, was interested in directing it, with Tom Cruise in the Clive Owen role, was so confused by the plot that he organized a table reading in his office at DreamWorks to clarify who did what to whom. Later, he jokingly suggested that the DVD include, as a bonus track, a chronological run-through of the story. (Ultimately, he dropped out.)

The core of “Duplicity” is the screenwriting trope known as the reversal. Gilroy told me, “A reversal is just anything that’s a surprise. It’s a way of keeping the audience interested.” A camera follows a man as he goes up the stairs to an apartment; we see his wedding ring as he pulls out his keys. He pushes open the door, slowly—a husband coming home, trudging up the stairs with his briefcase. But a woman in black lingerie greets him: he’s seeing his mistress! That is a reversal. In “Good Will Hunting,” when Matt Damon, mopping the floor at a university, comes upon a complicated math problem on a blackboard and solves it, the audience suddenly realizes that he is not an ordinary janitor—that’s a reversal, too. “Duplicity” is so crammed with reversals that Stephen Schiff, a screenwriter who is a friend of Gilroy’s, says that the story “achieves a kind of meta quality.”

Not only are reversals the building blocks of Gilroy’s dramas; they are often how he apprehends the world. In May, 2007, he was in a taxi, on his way to pick up his eleven-year-old daughter at Chelsea Piers, the sports complex by the Hudson River. The cabdriver was talking on his cell phone and ran a red light. The cab hit another car. Gilroy, peering from the window, could see that the other car had been totalled. He did not think that he had been hurt. “So they’re lifting the other guy out of the car, and I’m thinking, I’m lucky,” he said. “And—it’s a great shot, but it must have been done a thousand times—I’m sitting there watching them take the other guy away and I’m thinking, Great, I’m the lucky one. Then I see them come at my cab with those things, the jaws of life.” Gilroy had fractured a hip and a rib.

Gilroy believes that the writer and the moviegoing public are engaged in a cognitive arms race. As the audience grows savvier, the screenwriter has to invent new reversals—madder music and stronger wine. Perhaps the most famous reversal in film was written by William Goldman, originally in his 1974 novel “Marathon Man,” then honed for the movie version. Laurence Olivier, a sadistic Nazi dentist, is drilling into Dustin Hoffman’s mouth, trying to force him to disclose the location of a stash of diamonds. “Is it safe?” he keeps asking. Suddenly, William Devane sweeps in to rescue him and spirits Hoffman away. In the subsequent car ride, Devane starts asking questions; he wants to know where the diamonds are. After a few minutes, Hoffman’s eyes grow wide: Devane and Olivier are in league! “Thirty years ago, when Bill Goldman wrote it, the reversal in ‘Marathon Man’ was fresh,” Gilroy says. “But it must have been used now four thousand times.”

This is the problem that new movies must solve. As Gilroy says, “How do you write a reversal that uses the audience’s expectations in a new way? You have to write to their accumulated knowledge.” Before Gilroy wrote “Duplicity,” audiences had been trained by the mixed-up time schemes of “Memento,” “Amores Perros,” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” Moviegoers got used to an aesthetic of disorientation. They also have DVDs, so they can watch a film twice to untangle its story, and the Internet, which allows them to look up a bit of jargon or insider information. Reality is a confluence of fragments, to be apprehended bit by bit; watching a movie has begun to approximate the rhythm of a Google search. Gilroy bragged to Variety about the nonlinear structure of “Clayton”: “In theory, if I make a real world, and there are some dramatic events taking place in there, I should be able to drop the needle anywhere 28 times and make something interesting out of it.”

A central challenge of “Duplicity,” in Gilroy’s estimation, is its humorous tone. Although breaking from chronology is an established convention of the noir genre—at the start of “Sunset Boulevard,” William Holden is floating dead in a pool—a comedy audience does not expect a test. Moreover, “Duplicity” is expensive. Movie stars don’t come cheap, so “Duplicity” has to make money at the mall. Taylor Hackford, who directed “Dolores Claiborne” and “The Devil’s Advocate,” says of “Duplicity,” “I’m not so sure it’s a picture that’s going to play to sixteen- or seventeen-year-olds, but who knows?”

If you worked in Universal’s marketing department, and you wanted to make the plot of “Duplicity” sound simple, you’d probably say that it’s a corporate-espionage story: two former spies work together to steal a valuable secret formula developed by a consumer-products company. A moviegoer lured in by this summary, however, will soon realize that it’s equally possible that Claire is tricking Ray, or that Ray is tricking Claire, or that the company with the formula is gaming them or being gamed by a rival.

The movie makes an effort to keep the viewer off balance. The action skitters between Dubai, Rome, New York, London, the Bahamas, Miami, and Cleveland. The scammers are scammed, and those who look defeated suddenly bounce back. A whimsical score reminds you not to take any of it too seriously. Watching “Duplicity,” viewers hear nearly the same conversation between Claire and Ray five times, and each time it upends what they think is going on in the movie. The first time is in New York. Ray, now working for a rival conglomerate, has just been assigned to track Claire, who has taken a job with the consumer-products company. At first glance, it’s one of those happy screwball-comedy coincidences that so many movies depend on. The two confront each other at Lord & Taylor, in midtown. Claire says she doesn’t know who he is. “I’m not great on names,” Ray says to her. “Where I’m solid? People I’ve slept with. That’s been a traditional area of strength for me. You charm me. Seduce me. Screw me. Then you dope me and ransack my hotel room. And how sick is this? Last thing I remember before I passed out was how much I liked you.”

Claire responds that she has no idea who he is. Does she really not remember him? Is she pretending? Or are they playacting together, knowing that someone else is listening to them?

Each time this exchange is repeated, the audience feels a fresh sense of vertigo. The success of “Duplicity” hinges, in no small part, on whether the audience will experience this sensation as pleasurable. Gilroy told me that he knew of no other movie where the same dialogue gets used five times for five reversals. “What the fuck,” he said. “I hope the audience thinks the film is broken.”

This was Gilroy’s attitude after he’d finished filming, in the early summer. But studios test the marketability of their material at screenings, many in suburban Los Angeles malls, where typical moviegoers share their responses. “We are going to get some interesting audience cards on this one,” Gilroy said in June. He had final cut on “Duplicity”—his agent negotiated for it after “Clayton” received its Oscar nominations—but the studio, which controlled the production budget of sixty million dollars, could be quite persuasive.

The movie first screened in Sherman Oaks, in the San Fernando Valley. Most viewers liked it, but many were confused. “I get the same things back on every picture I’ve ever done,” Gilroy said. “It’s something about the way I write.” The studio, anticipating the response, had asked Gilroy to film a scene that could be a more conventional, chronological opener—the party in Dubai, where Ray and Claire meet before sleeping together. “The studio made us shoot it,” Gilroy said. At the second Sherman Oaks screening, the film began in Dubai. Gilroy says that he is happy about the change. He recalls the first time he watched the reordered sequence: “We dropped it in and we went, ‘Wow!’ It did all these unintended positive things.” The reception of the revised “Duplicity” was stronger. “Our numbers went way up,” he said.

Tony Gilroy is fifty-two years old, six feet one, and handsome—Tony of the easy smile. His father is Frank D. Gilroy, who won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for his play “The Subject Was Roses.” Tony has two younger brothers, who are twins: John, the film editor, and Dan, a screenwriter in Los Angeles. Frank Gilroy wrote a lot of scripts—some for studios, some for television networks, and some on his own—but he did not want his boys to go into the film business. He and his wife, Ruth, raised their sons far from Hollywood, in Orange County, New York. His home town, Washingtonville, was a popular community for the families of cops and firemen who worked in New York City. Frank Gilroy was home, unless he was working on a project in Hollywood. When Tony was a teen-ager, he told friends of his father’s that he was being raised with “a luxurious sense of insecurity.” “We’d go to Europe for the summer and then come back and work a plumbing job,” he recalls.

The milieu of Washingtonville High School in the early seventies favored drugs and fighting at the expense of academics. Gilroy was intellectually curious but unfocussed. “I don’t remember writing anything until I wrote my college application,” he says. In 1973, he enrolled at Boston University but dropped out after two years to play guitar in local Boston bands; later, he wrote songs. For a time, he sold gray-market copier ink to pay the rent. He was talented at the work, and says that it was good training for Hollywood.

In the late seventies, he began to write fiction. He moved back into his parents’ home in Washingtonville to save money and worked on short stories. Minimalist writers like Raymond Carver appealed to him, as did Robert Stone and James T. Farrell. “I was really into sentences and really into punctuation and really into rhythm, and really into compression,” he remembers. He loved writers who relied on dialogue—modified tough-guy talk—to move their stories forward. “Farrell is eighty per cent dialogue,” Gilroy says.

In the early eighties, Gilroy began a “rock-and-roll novel.” To make money, he tended bar in various West Side restaurants, including O’Neals’, on Forty-third Street. His brother John worked at the bistro Un Deux Trois, a block away. Frank Gilroy remembers, “I used to be able to go into New York and have a drink or two at Johnny’s bar, then go through a parking lot and have a drink or two with Tony.” He thought that Tony’s writing was getting better and better. “He was getting inside the castle walls,” he says.

But Tony was not finding the world of fiction very welcoming. His work sat awkwardly between the literary and the commercial worlds. “I had an open door for further rejection at a multitude of places,” he says. His father had used screenwriting to support his work in the theatre; Tony decided to do the same for his fiction. “I said, ‘I’ll write some screenplays and make a bunch of money and I’ll finish the novel and be a famous novelist.’ “ Soon he was selling original screenplays. One of the first to register with producers was “R.S.V.P.,” written in 1985-86, a comedy about a couple who, as a joke, invite the President to their wedding and find that he accepts. In 1987 came “Tempted,” a high-concept comedy about a man who steals money from the bank where he works and then tries to put it back. Gilroy found screenwriting easy: “I knew where the scenes were. I knew when to get in and out. All of a sudden, I had perfect pitch.” He was by now “making a good living,” though he was frustrated that none of his screenplays were actually filmed.

In 1992, M-G-M released the first movie from a Gilroy screenplay, “The Cutting Edge,” a romantic comedy about a spoiled figure skater and a crude former hockey star. “‘Taming of the Shrew’ on ice,” Gilroy calls it. The movie is an affable cliché, but Gilroy was happy to receive a writing credit. He remembers thinking, “I’m going to be the last writer on this project even if it kills me.”

“Instead, let me be your investment adviser and get you eleven-per-cent return, year in and year out, regardless of market conditions.”

Gilroy bounces between two ideas of what it is to be a screenwriter: technician and artist. On one level, he is a regular guy, a union man with a job to do, just like the cops and firemen whose kids he grew up with in Washingtonville. “I hate that Paddy Chayefsky idea of a script—that it is cut in granite,” he says. “Someone who directs a movie word for word—they’re an idiot.” And: “The most makeable screenplay idea is to write a hero part for a guy between thirty and fifty”—a pause for effect—“with a gun.” He has long worked as a script doctor, and he speaks of such projects bluntly. He says, “If I come in and, say, you’re going to give me the weekly”—he gets as much as two hundred and fifty thousand dollars—“I’m basically promising you that I’m going to be able to get it done. I have made a temple out of that.”

In “Prater Violet,” Christopher Isherwood’s novel about Hollywood, a studio hire helping to write a movie says, “They torture us, and we have nothing to confess.” This is part of Gilroy’s self-image and part of what makes him good. But he is also a writer with ambition, and believes that his job is to create characters who are plausible, interesting, and even revelatory. “What you are really, really desperate for is for life to get out,” he says. Not every movie provides this possibility. “The thing is a lot of Tony’s anecdotes end with ‘And then I quit,’ “ the screenwriter David Koepp, a friend, says. “We call him Tony (Fuck You) Gilroy,” Taylor Hackford says. “He wants to do it his own way.”

In 1993, William Goldman, a longtime family friend, proposed Gilroy for the job of adapting “Dolores Claiborne,” the Stephen King novel, for Castle Rock. Gilroy liked the character of Claiborne, a woman suspected of murdering her husband on a small island off Maine. She had an unusual voice and a toughness that appealed to him. The problem with the story, he realized, was that “she confesses to the crime at the outset. The mystery was: Is this a reliable narrator? And that doesn’t seem intrinsically very dramatic to me onscreen.” Gilroy made “Claiborne” a movie by foregrounding Dolores’s daughter, Selena, who was sexually abused as a child. She is a secondary figure in King’s book; Gilroy made her an equal protagonist. Dolores’s attack on her husband and Selena’s emotional hurt are thus given the same weight—they are mutual survivors—and how they deal with their past in the present becomes the focus of the picture. This trick even impressed King, who wrote to Castle Rock to say that he wished he’d thought of it.

Taylor Hackford, who directed Gilroy’s script, wanted him for his next movie, “The Devil’s Advocate,” starring Al Pacino as John Milton, the head of a Manhattan law firm who happens to be Beelzebub. He showed Gilroy the script. “This just sucks,” Gilroy told Hackford. “It was very soapy, Satanism meets ‘Dynasty,’ “ he remembers. Hackford pressed Gilroy, and, reluctantly, he agreed to join Hackford in Los Angeles to work for a week for free, on the condition that if he backed out of the project they would remain friends. He took a copy of “The Portable Nietzsche” and C. S. Lewis’s “The Screwtape Letters,” and spent the flight to L.A. thinking about how to dramatize evil.

Gilroy writes in spurts. “Dolores Claiborne” and “Duplicity” were each written in about twelve weeks. “He feels fucked up and blocked and crazy for a long time,” Schiff says. “He tortures himself. Then, as it’s coalescing, he sits down to outline, and when he’s outlining he insists on doing it very, very fast—the whole movie he sketches out in, like, four days. I’m sure that during those four days his wife doesn’t see him and no one talks to him. And the reason he does that, he says, is it’s a movie and it has to move fast. ‘I have to write fast. I have to think fast. My fingers have to move fast.’ “ Back in New York, Gilroy rewrote “The Devil’s Advocate,” and came up with one of the more famous rants in recent movies. “God,” John Milton says, “is an absentee landlord! Worship that? Never!” He goes on, “Who in their right mind . . . could possibly deny the twentieth century was entirely mine? All of it . . . all of it mine. I’m peaking. . . . It’s my time now.” In the draft that Gilroy inherited, the ambitious young lawyer played by Keanu Reeves—whose seduction by New York is the film’s main story—was Milton’s employee. Gilroy made him the Devil’s son. The paternity “makes it very manifest,” Gilroy explains. “ ‘I’m the other side of you that says, “If you want that, you can have that.” ’ That means I could write it and believe in it.” And the movie ends with a terrific reversal that even the most jaded viewer would not anticipate.

“The Devil’s Advocate” was a hit, earning Gilroy a reputation as a guy who could fix broken scripts. The “Bourne” movies confirmed that reputation. Robert Ludlum published “The Bourne Identity” in 1980. His Jason Bourne was a former career foreign-service officer targeted by the C.I.A. for assassination. (Carlos the Jackal, for some reason, also wanted him dead.) In the spring of 2000, when Doug Liman—the director of two indie hits, “Swingers” and “Go”—asked Gilroy if he would rewrite a screenplay based on Ludlum’s book, Gilroy was not enthusiastic. “Those works were never meant to be filmed,” he says. “They weren’t about human behavior. They were about running to airports.” In general, he finds the dialogue in thriller novels deficient; it often makes him laugh. “The filter that readers put on to read a certain kind of fiction is very forgiving,” he says. Liman persuaded him to look at the screenplay, and Gilroy found it awful. “It was a huge, you know, fifteen-gunmen-on-the-Metro-blowing-the-fuck-out-of-everything kind of movie,” he says. Liman pushed for a meeting anyway. They got together at Bubby’s, a coffee shop in Tribeca. Gilroy asked Liman why he wanted to make “this absolute piece of shit,” and said to count him out. Liman asked him for his ideas. Gilroy gave him one: Throw the novel out and just take the idea of an assassin with amnesia. Fill him with both doubt and an amazing set of lethal skills. Then what was interesting was how he was both like the rest of us and different from us. “If you woke up, and you didn’t know who you were,” Gilroy later told Liman, “you only have one way to find out, which is, like, the things you can do. What language do you speak? Do I know how to lay bricks? What do I know how to do? I guess your movie should be about a guy who finds the only thing he knows how to do is kill people.”

By the time Gilroy got to his office, Liman and the executives on the movie had left him a dozen messages. He agreed to work on the film. As he put it in a letter to Matt Damon, who played Bourne, the DNA of the movie was “action with intimacy. Emotional credibility. Exotic locations treated in a completely nonglamorous way. Molecularly real people thrust into a heightened realm.” He characterized Bourne’s thoughts: “Who am I? If I’m a bad person, do I have to stay that way? Can I stay alive long enough to work it out?”

“The Bourne Identity” was a character-driven movie that young audiences would actually sit through: it made more than two hundred million dollars worldwide. The script was admired by other screenwriters. (Rob Kamen, a friend of Gilroy’s, remembers, “I would just sit there and hate him because he was so good.”) Gilroy is proud of the film, except for the parts he did not manage to rewrite. “Anything that’s from the book is in the first five minutes, in which Bourne, inexplicably, has got microfilm in his ass. Why? I don’t know! After that, when he steps off the boat, everything else is mine.”

Gilroy did not like working with Liman, who constantly reshot scenes. “He didn’t have any sense of story, or cause and effect,” he says. As quickly as he would write a reversal, Liman would undo it, which angered him. “My scripts are very, very difficult to fuck with,” he says. Liman, for his part, found Gilroy “arrogant.” He remembers a fight with Gilroy early in the preproduction process: “I was telling Tony, I’m going to spend the next two years of my life on the movie . . . and Tony’s saying to me he showed the script to his friend Billy Goldman, and Billy Goldman said it was perfect, and he didn’t want to change a word.” At one point, Liman hired a new screenwriter; Matt Damon threatened to walk off the movie if Gilroy’s script wasn’t used.

For the next “Bourne,” Universal invited back Damon and Gilroy but looked for a new director. The studio offered the writer three million dollars if he wrote a script good enough to be filmed. Gilroy agreed, on the condition that the second “Bourne” not be a repeat of the first. He asked himself what was wrong with “The Bourne Identity,” and decided that Damon’s character had got off too easy; he was a murderer, if a reluctant one, and he had to suffer for his crimes. Gilroy’s new script took Bourne on a voyage to Russia to apologize to a girl whom he had orphaned. Years before, the C.I.A. had sent Bourne on a training mission. His target was a Russian politician, but his wife was in the room when Bourne arrived, and he killed them both. Afterward, he covered up the double murder as a murder-suicide. Bourne’s apology to the girl would have to be deep—a true repentance. This time, Bourne would earn the affection that the audience felt for him. As he was working to get his past back, he would give the girl her past back. “I think that movie could have been ‘The Searchers’ of action films,” Gilroy says.

The studio, with Gilroy’s help, hired a new director, Paul Greengrass, who had made “Bloody Sunday,” about the 1972 British massacre of Irish protestors in Derry. Greengrass’s aesthetic was cinéma vérité, his trademark a constantly moving handheld camera. Greengrass made the “Bourne” sequel a visually innovative picture, one in which dialogue was scant and motivation gave way to momentum. The Times praised the look, the speed, and the sheen of the film, calling a chase sequence “one of the three or four most exciting demolition derbies ever filmed.” There was no mention of Bourne’s atonement. Gilroy is still angry about it. “It was sort of like a crime against the gods of storytelling,” he says.

In 2005, the studio used another large check to persuade Gilroy to write the third “Bourne” movie. One of the conditions of his taking the money was that he would not have to speak with Greengrass. Gilroy wrote a draft of the script, and then left the project. Then Greengrass passed the script on to four other writers, among them Tom Stoppard. Frank Marshall, one of the series’ producers, says that “The Bourne Ultimatum” is, at its core, still Gilroy’s story. Its worldwide gross was four hundred and forty million dollars. Gilroy never saw it.

By the late nineties, Gilroy knew that he wanted to direct his own script. He wrote “Michael Clayton,” which drew on his childhood in Washingtonville, and on themes he cared deeply about: morality, corruption, marginality. He saw the consequences of selling it for someone else to film: “I could wake up in five years and be sitting across from some production person, taking notes, and no one would be able to save me from that.” His friends weren’t surprised that he was thinking of directing. David Koepp says, “If it’s a screenwriter with strong opinions, which certainly describes Tony, it’s likely.” Gilroy took his pitch to Castle Rock: “I want to do a movie about a lawyer who’s a fixer, and it’ll be in New York, and there won’t be any courtrooms and someone will die and it will have a good starring part, and I want to direct it.” Despite Gilroy’s reputation as a writer, he could not get the backing to film “Clayton.” He recalls, “No one wanted to work with a first-time director. . . . But what actor who’s that kind of actor doesn’t look at ‘The Verdict’ at three in the morning and say, ‘Fuck, I’d love to play a part like that. How do I get that part?’ “ It took him more than five years of meetings and a change of agents—from International Creative Management to Creative Artists Agency—before George Clooney, also a C.A.A. client, committed to the title role. Clooney waived his usual fee; in return, he became one of the owners of the film. For Gilroy, it was worth it. Here, at last, was a chance to make a movie unencumbered by the intervention of the directors and studios that had “whimmed to death” his other work.

“Clayton” is layered with reversals, some so subtle that you may not notice them. In one of the first scenes, the camera notes that Clayton’s car has a malfunctioning G.P.S. unit. You think, Good set design—those things never work. But the scene runs a second time, toward the end of the movie, in its proper chronological place, and this time you realize that the reason the G.P.S. unit is broken is that someone opened up the device and spliced a bomb into it. Similarly, there is a quick shot early in the movie of Tilda Swinton having a panic attack in a ladies’ room. She is sweating, practically hyperventilating. In her next scene, she has stepped out for an interview with the company’s in-house camera crew. The juxtaposition leaves the viewer a bit mystified: She sure is nervous. But a careful observer might notice that Swinton wears a different outfit in each scene, and that the pink blouse from the first scene matches one she wears an hour and a half later in the movie, at a moment when she has just ordered a second murder. Now you understand her anxiety.

Gilroy’s favorite scene is a delicate exchange between Swinton, who plays the attorney Karen Crowder, and Robert Prescott, an assassin named Mr. Verne, in which she may or may not be authorizing him to kill someone:

VERNE: We have some good ideas. You say move, we move. The ideas don’t look so good we back off, reassess.

The answer is in Swinton’s face—an analogue to the look that Claire throws over her shoulder in “Duplicity.” In an e-mail, Swinton told me, “Tony places at the centre of a scene an unsaid—maybe unsayable—thing and then sets his characters dancing around it: some beating a path towards it, others flashing up decoys of distraction.”

In “Clayton,” Gilroy nailed the character that he had been chasing, with variations, for so many years—an updated version of the role Humphrey Bogart used to play, the idealistic burnout with one last fight in him. It also provided a gloss on Gilroy’s own career: in the film business, who is the fixer—skilled at his work, necessary for his industry, and underappreciated, even resented, by the people who depend on him—if not the screenwriter?

In late May, the cast and crew of “Duplicity” were in a ballroom at the St. Regis Hotel in Rome, preparing to shoot another key scene in the movie. Gilroy, from his days as a script doctor, is used to rewriting scenes on the fly. He was still trying to fine-tune the relationship between Ray and Claire, the balance between passion and competition, professional admiration and mistrust. By now, the audience has heard their key exchange several times. They might not be sure who is gaming whom, but it is increasingly clear that they mean something to each other.

To shoot the scene, the lighting crew lit the ballroom beyond its norm, highlighting the hotel’s nicked paint and faded curtains. Roberts and Owen sat down in overstuffed armchairs. A single camera would begin close in, and then pull away slowly. Gilroy wanted a lengthy shot, one in which the audience would have a lot of time to examine the two actors’ faces and bodies for clues. There would be no second camera, meaning that, when Gilroy set to work in the Brill Building, there would be no alternative angles to choose from.

Gilroy interrupted. He reminded the actors that they were no longer facing off. “There should be no hostility,” Gilroy explained to me. They had suffered a reversal, and the effect, for now at least, was to bring them closer together. A second take: Roberts and Owen leaned toward each other as they spoke. They took each other’s hands.

CLAIRE: I can’t breathe.

RAY: You’ll be O.K.

CLAIRE: When?

RAY: After we wake up in Rome.

CLAIRE: We might have to wake up in Rome for a long time. . . .

RAY: That sounds like a plan.

“Cut,” Gilroy said. He still didn’t like it. The actors tried the scene different ways. Gilroy changed Ray’s line to “Sounds like a plan.” After each take, the camera, the lighting, and the sound had to be fixed. The hours dragged on.

At midnight, the crew broke for a meal, and Gilroy joined them. He gets along well with technical crews. A grip distributed homemade mozzarella as Gilroy mulled. “We don’t want to tee the ball up,” he said. Upon returning to the ballroom, Gilroy offered a variant line. The actors tried it:

CLAIRE: We might have to wake up in Rome for a long time.

RAY: Plan on it.

The line still felt too much like a zinger. Owen looked like he’d rather be saying something else; Roberts looked like she’d rather hear something else. The techies looked pained. Gilroy quietly gave the actors notes. “Action,” he said.

CLAIRE: I can’t breathe.

RAY: You’ll be O.K.

CLAIRE: When?

RAY: After we wake up in Rome.

CLAIRE: We might have to wake up in Rome for a long time.

RAY: That’s the plan.

The flatness of the line worked against Owen’s British accent, eliminating the whiff of effortful wit. The more serious tone suggested that running a “triple game” had been difficult for Ray; it humanized him. He was no longer just a man with a good suit and an easy smile. The actors had given the scene a useful tentativeness: the sexual bond between Ray and Claire was clear, but now something deeper was at stake. At the same time, the underlined intimacy of the scene—the silence around the dialogue, the sustained shot—would make the viewer suspicious. Hadn’t we fallen for this sort of thing many times before? Was a new trick coming? This was a movie about acting, after all. The camera slowly pulled back, all the way out of the room, teasing the audience.